End of the world news

Intro

Sorry Mr Burgess, but I think now might be an appropriate time to steal your title. Of course the unqualified wittering I am about to record may simply be a symptom of my age and I must admit I haven’t done any research into whether people are inclined to predict future doom and pestilence once they reach their forties. The image of an old man walking Oxford street with his sandwich board proclaiming ‘The end is nigh’ springs to mind.

These days any nutter with the inclination can gain a far greater audience without having to lug a couple of pieces of plywood tied with string many miles each day. What’s more, there seems to be some kind of automatic credibility associated with a website that the sandwichboard man could never have dreamed of.

So between looking for jobs and learning yet more computer languages and paradigms I have been browsing discussions on various topical subjects. Personally I tend to follow climate change ‘debate’, politics and civil liberties issues. There is a large intersection between these subjects of course and it is obvious that a lot of ‘contributors’ don’t understand that one affects the other. In addition since it seems impossible to blow your own nose without some piece of software to make it easier for you, I can at least see how computers might aid or hinder our efforts in any particular field.

What is hard is pulling all of this stuff together in a coherent way to prove that we really are doomed. Yes doomed I say! So put away your jizz mags and your special brew and pay attention.

What the public have to say

You should read this BBC Have Your Say ‘debate‘ about whether climate change has been understated, although in reality any online forum on climate change will provide the same depressing realisation that the majority won’t consider any evidence until the waves are lapping at their doors. The BBC makes it worse by only allowing 500 characters and filtering out any URLs making it easy to submit dogmatic criticisms and hard to submit an evidence based rebuttal.

Why is there so much sceptisism about Anthropomorphic Climate Change (ACC)

Money makes the [fecking] world go round

Who makes money?

The people who sell you crap you don’t need make money. Even the stuff we do need is sold based on what the market is willing to pay rather than its intrinsic value.

The government then taxes the income of those who make the product, those who sell the product and those who buy the product.

Shareholders who have invested in the product demand returns on their investment, and their investment is valued on the willingness of people to purchase the product.

So ‘business’ needs marketers to tell people what they want (need) to buy and a medium that reaches the maximum number of suckers consumers to deliver the message to.

Once it was just TV, then it was viral marketing via e-mail,now it is epidemic marketing through social networking sites.

So we have a treadmill of ever increasing ‘growth’ in economic terms. I have to ask what is the goal of sustained economic growth? In nature things can only grow to some genetically or environmentally imposed limit. When cells defy this rule we call them cancer. When insect populations defy this rule we call them plagues. We only have one world. That may or may not change in the future, but until it does we need to recognise that our survival is dependant upon an intricate web of interaction with all the other organisms that share our currently unique planet

This is where I got too pissed to continue ranting…

Actually it was turning out to be an extraordinarily long rant, and I never managed to finish it before the wine sent me to sleep. As is befitting of such an epic potential global catastrophe…so forget it. It’s christmas now (when I finally returned to realise I had started this and not finished, you lucky people). Lets just get all those lights up and fire up the playstations.